Ok, hypothetically speaking (because right now I'm not editing, but I may want to do this in the future): Let's say I want to do an especially complex (i.e. an excess of layers and effects) portion of my video, but I don't want to have to render it every single time I want to preview the sections of my video around it or deal with all the layers, etc., so instead I edit this portion of my video, render it into an .avi file as a loop, and then import that clip back into Vegas so it won't have all the layers and such slowing down the render/preview.

My first question is: Is this possible? I ask because a while ago I was helping someone with Vegas and he told me that he tried to do something like this, but when he imported the clip back into Vegas all the layers and whatnot still showed up on the timeline.

My second question is: Assuming it is possible, and that the original clip is encoded with, say, Lagarith, would I export the loop uncompressed and import THAT into Vegas? Or will I have to re-encode the clip with Lagarith in VirtualDubMod?

CrackTheSky wrote:Yeah, that's what I thought. So would I need to re-encode it?

If you can export in Lagarith with Vegas, then there isn't a need to export uncompressed and re-encode to Lagarith via VirtualDub. If not, then yes, you need to re-encode. Unless hard drive space isn't an issue, in which case you could leave it as Uncompressed. This should help previewing as playing Uncompressed is less stressful on a system compared to Lagarith (or Huffyuv) unless you have a slow hard drive or one in a bad need of a de-fragment. Of course, a really fast system with lots of RAM would also help...

If the layers and whatnot show up again on the timeline of Vegas on the imported clip, I suspect what happened was that the portion of the project was saved (not exported/rendered), and re-imported into the new/original project--not the exported video segment. (This is assuming that pre-version 7 Vegas has this capability. I thought that this was a new v7 feature.)